An Indian parliamentary committee has grilled a top Facebook executive after the social media giant was accused of bias and not acting against anti-Muslim posts on its platform.
The closed-door hearing on Wednesday followed accusations in newspaper reports that the social media giant was allowing hate speech on its platform and that its top policy official in India had shown favouritism towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
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Facebook came under scrutiny after a series of reports by the US-based Wall Street Journal (WSJ) showed the company ignored anti-Muslim hate speech by BJP politicians while Facebook’s public-policy chief in India, Ankhi Das, made decisions favouring Modi’s party.
On Tuesday, New Delhi-based English daily the Indian Express reported that following a request from the party, Facebook had removed pages critical of the BJP months before the 2019 general elections.
India is Facebook’s biggest market, with more than 300 million users, while the company’s messaging app, WhatsApp, boasts 400 million users.
Politicians within Modi’s Hindu nationalist party have come under scrutiny for running online campaigns laced with false claims and attacks on the minority Muslim population.
Dozens of Muslims have been lynched in the past six years by vigilantes, with many of the incidents triggered by fake news regarding cow slaughter or smuggling shared on WhatsApp.
Meanwhile, Facebook has banned an outspoken right-wing Indian politician T. Raja Singh for spreading hate speech about Muslims.
A Facebook spokesman said, a regional lawmaker for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party, T. Raja Singh, was blocked “for violating our policy prohibiting those that promote or engage in violence and hate from having a presence on our platform.
Raja, who made headlines for reportedly saying that Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar should be shot, will now be put on a Facebook list of “dangerous individuals”.
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